Just created a thread. Hope no-one minds the non-moderator for doing so. :)

Daily slides

Transport usage is coming down

New cases have gone up since yesterday. Overall they do seem to be levelling off with day to day variations

Hospital patients are starting to become more stable. Down 2% nationally and 15% in the East of England

Deaths no real change which it won't do so for a while with the lag

Chief Medical Director: The number of Covid-19 hospitalisations are stabilising and plateauing.

Hospital admissions down, time to reopen garden centres 😎

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My finance stuck in Sharjah, UAE as she was a oversea fiipina worker.  We applied for finacee visa and she got the supporting documents but our solictor who got virus in March did not return to work to reply our emails and to book her appointment to take TB tests and give the documents at UKVi office.  Her sisters also stuck there and cannot travel back to Philppines so they are so bored stuck inside the house.  I just wish the solicitor or have another one to act for her to update us what happening as I paid the premium 30 days service which she should be here in end of March.  I was in Dubai in Sept and Dec 2019 and everything was normal there.  We both wish we had applied in October last year if we had knew the virus screwed it and delay it.  I talked to her about my premium service to be refunded because it already exceed 30 days and solictor did not make any updates on us so leaving us in limbo.  She so bored of waiting and lately play guitar or dance with her sister to pass time while I build few Lego sets to keep me busy when I have no Lego orders here as I work from home.  I will apply for career break from work so no more long travel and hotels costs and when she finally come here don;t want to leave her behind and go full time in Lego.

 Encouraging. Definitely stabilising at the least.

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Q: Isn’t is just unfair to produce a graph comparing UK figures, without care home deaths, to French figures, with care home deaths? (See 5.10pm.) On a like by like basis, the UK would be ahead of France, wouldn’t it?

Doyle accepts it would be better if the figures did compare like with like. The government is always ready to learn, she says.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2020/apr/14/coronavirus-uk-live-news-lockdown-extended-peak-dominic-raab-boris-johnson-latest-updates

 

Very naughty of the UK govt. The French provide care home deaths as a separate count and there is no need for them to be included. 

 

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I used to watch them live when all this was developing but now whenever I do I find them largely useless and the questions are often not strong enough. I'm resorting to seeing the bullet-point summary of what was said.

It's impressive to see how road traffic fell quite sharply over Easter. I assume that reflects fewer lorries on the road as much as people sharing at home for Easter.

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The Government Covid-19 tracker has been discontinued and replaced with this, which seems somewhat inferior:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Strangely, the graph of new cases (a) is only for England, (b) bears no relation to the figures previously shown on the old Dashboard, in the press conferences and from other sources, and (c) shows a huge fall in positive tests, from 4,339 on 7th April to just 104 yesterday. I'm assuming this chart shows tests by the date of test rather than the date of the result. But why do this?

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Following Government advice, on Easter Sunday there should have been virtually no traffic at all. All supermarkets were closed, pharmacies as well I presume; I also presume you couldn't have got a delivery? Yet there were still some cars coming and going, albeit far fewer than normal.

Our next door neighbour and his (adult) son disappeared early on Sunday morning and didn't come back until Monday evening, though the wife and two other kids stayed home. No idea where they went or why but I'm not going to ask!

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I think we are past the peak and deaths will start dropping to 500 a day next week and maybe 300 the week after

Is that acceptable enough to ease the lockdown?

As for Nightingale being unused, we may still need it for the second wave in the Autumn

The second wave of Spanish flu was much worse that the first, though a very different type of virus of course

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I think we should first see what happens in countries that are easing their lockdowns now. In a sense we're in a fortunate position again of being able to learn from what happens elsewhere. 

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Duh. Looks like a bishop found his faith was misplaced! From CNN:

"Bishop Gerald Glenn, the pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Virginia has died, the church announced on Sunday. Glenn had tested positive for coronavirus, according to a video posted by his daughter Mar-Gerie Crawley.

Despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to avoid mass gatherings and maintain social distancing, Glenn said in a sermon on March 22, "I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus," and announced he was not afraid to die."
 
https://us.cnn.com/2020/04/14/us/bishop-gerald-glenn-god-larger-coronavirus-dies/index.html
 

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I might be being a bit thick here but when we started the lockdown there was a small number of people in the country with the virus which has resulted in the deaths we are seeing. We have stopped the exponential growth with a pretty strict lockdown but when that stops in what looks like a few weeks what is going to stop another big rise in cases? In fact surely the rise will be greater as the virus has a greater presence than when we started the lockdown and it seems we are a long way from having enough of the population immune to curtail its spread? 

Agreed.

Let's hope that we are close to turning the tide, at least to a degree.

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My own view is that the lockdown cannot be lifted 100% until there is either a vaccine or some other treatment that can get this country over the worst of the virus. I think that as long as there is neither a vaccine nor a proven treatment, restrictions on what we can and cannot do outside are almost certain to continue, even if not on the scale of the present time.

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And this is now the critical point , what is the number needed for the relaxing of restrictions to be introduced 

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Not thick at all , and that's the trouble, no one has a clue who has or hadn't had the virus -  its a big gamble no matter what restrictions are released first .

Rush everyone back and we could be in trouble  , like Brian I think it would be a wise move to see how other countries manage the release 

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Just to frustrate me my mate flew back in on Sunday from Thailand , walked straight in , through customs , no discussion .

Plane was 75% full so WTF is that all about 

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It will return as soon as there's any attempt to ease the restrictions. My guess is that they'll be eased very very slowly.  Just look at Hokkaido - restrictions eased and within a week or two there's a new outbreak and the restrictions are reimposed.

There is no simple route out of this.

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Was he not tested prior to boarding?

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I was reading about Hokkaido this morning , horrendous .

I agree , this has to be a very very slow release 

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Just to underline the way viruses are endemic, the U.K. has been declared to no longer be free of Measles - courtesy of the stupidity of social media fraudsters claiming MMR is dangerous.

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